Editor's take: Photorealistic graphics once felt similar the be-all and end-all of video game development. As engineering advanced over time, devs were able to bring stunning imagery to life. Yet, something strange happened. Graphics starting looking too expert – colors were exaggerated and the lighting was as well perfect. Everything looked groovy, mind you, but information technology still didn't await real. There was unnaturalness to information technology all, and subsequently seeing the latest piece of work from researchers at Intel Labs, I've come to realize that devs likely avoided the realness of the real world on purpose.

The researchers' work centers on enhancing the realism of synthetic images – in this case, taking Thou Theft Auto V and making information technology look realistic.

Their approach involves taking a rendered image from the game and passing it through an prototype enhancement network to create an enhanced image. The method further extracts a ready of rendering buffers from the game, which includes data like photographic camera distance and glossiness, and passes it through a yard-buffer encoder network. At that place'south also a perceptual discriminator that generates a realism score, and as you might have guessed, real-world images are also fed into the algorithm.

Information technology goes way deeper than that (the full paper on the subject field is available for those that wish to dig deeper), merely every bit you can see, there'south a dramatic difference betwixt how the game unremarkably looks and how information technology looks with the photorealism enhancement.

GTA V vs. ML

Sure, it looks way more realistic, all the same oddly enough, it's too realistic… borderline creepy, even. But, perhaps that'southward just my stance. What do you think? Would you want to play a version of GTA V that looks hyper realistic, or does this "enhancement" push by the boundary of amusement?

Image credit oneinchpunch